Pappy

Abstract

Pappy Andre Dubus III (bio) It was a winter afternoon in Louisiana when my grandfather told me that he may have killed two men. I was in my early twenties and Pappy was fifty years older than that and we were sitting in his pickup truck amongst the pine trees. Because his eyesight was going, I sat behind the wheel, my grandfather hunched on the passenger's side. There were a month of white whiskers across his face and throat, and between us on the bench seat were copper pipe fittings and an empty tin of Skoal chewing tobacco, and even though it was cold outside, the oak cistern up against the cabin filled with thick ice, Pappy kept his window down so that he could spit out onto the gravel road. Ahead of us, the late sun shone down through the jack pines that sloped to a gulley of thickets and fallen hardwoods, and beyond these was a rise of more trees, ten acres of them. The summer before, I and my older cousins, Micky and Eddie Owens, the sons of my mother's sister Jeanie, cleared half an acre of Pappy's land in one day. Eddie's friend Deke, a crop duster pilot, was there too, and it was so hot and humid it was like breathing steam and we'd taken our chainsaws to over two dozen trees, most of them oak and hickory, so there was no shade, and now that midday Louisiana sun was pressing its searing irons into us, but we didn't care. All four of us had our shirts off, and we were slick with sweat and working in a kind of frenzy, Micky and Eddie shearing limbs off the felled tree trunks, their roaring, smoking chain saws spraying wood chips and oil as they then cut those trunks into three-foot logs that Deke [End Page 17] and I would squat and grasp and heave onto our shoulders, half-running with them, their bark digging into our bare shoulders and necks before hurling them into the bed of Pappy's pickup. We'd do this again and again till Pappy's truck bed was low to the ground, and Deke and I would drive it fast back to my grandparents' camp where we'd toss one log after another onto the pile between the carport and workshop, a tin-sided, corrugated-roofed building Pappy built with his own hands. What was clear to me and probably to my two older cousins, is that we grandsons of Elmer Lamar Lowe were working in a joyous, suffering frenzy not for us but for him, a man who spoke little and who valued one thing in a man and one thing only: can he work? It was all he'd been doing since he was a boy, one who never went further than the third grade, a boy who at sixteen was a foreman for grown men laying train tracks under the punitive sun, a man who during the Great Depression was making an unheard of sixty-five dollars a day, suicide pay for setting bridge piers in a diving bell suit in the muddy depths of the Mississippi. Many men drowned doing this, but our grandfather went on to become a pipe fitter who helped to build power plants throughout the south and Mexico. His wife, our grandmother Fern, was raised on a rice farm in Evangeline Parish, and when she first saw young Elmer Lowe, Scotch/Irish handsome and driving the first automobile she'd ever seen, she knew she was going to marry that man, and they went on to have first one daughter and then eight years later another, my future mother–two girls raised largely in trailer homes or rented houses not far from whatever power plant their father was working to erect. Bits of this family history came to me sporadically and out of order, the way it tends to for the following generations, usually over coffee or beer or whiskey, early in the morning or late at night. Maybe some of it scribbled somewhere and found late, if at all. All I knew is that by...